135200 - Unprofessional behavior exhibited by a Mozilla developer

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(mozilla.org :: Miscellaneous, task)

Description

[roberts]

I believe [e-mail] has exhibited unacceptable behavior towards
persons reporting problems with DOM Text Conversion.  A number of people have
taken the time to report an unacceptable implementation of File->Save As->Text
in the latest release of Mozilla
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131166). 

[e-mail]'s responses to those bug reports have been argumentative
and discourteous.  He does a disservice to the Mozilla development effort. 

Doug Roberts
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Comment 1

[André Dahlqvist]

Over to Evangelism?:-)

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

-> Endico (CC Asa and BenB)

Comment 3

[James Cox]

sending to mozilla.org since b-g isn't really the right place.

Comment 4

[Felix Miata]

I concur with reporter.

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Read bug 131166 and judge yourself.

Robert, it would have been good behaviour to cc me. Matti, thanks for doing that.

Comment 6

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

Looks to me that the discussion in bug 131166 is quite civil and courteous (no
apparent silly personal attacks that I noticed made by either Ben Buckcsh or the
reporter of this bug). Ben's arguments as well as yours seem reasonable, you
just plain disagree about the issue. This bug is *really* the wrong way to solve
your personal differences, if you feel insulted, take it to personal e-mail
first please.

Comment 7

[James Cox]

as i see it, alot of the developers on the mozilla projects are deeply involved
in the growth etc of the project. Alot of them put more than their hours, blood,
sweat and toil in, so it's easy to see how they can get so ingrained that they
can come across as being rude -- it's not meant like that, but answering the
same question a bunch of times does that to you.

Ben is a good guy, works hard -- just maybe works too hard and has a bad method
of delivery sometimes. 

the underlying principle here is that a: bugzilla is about maintaining projects
/ tasks (primarily) and I concur with the earlier comment about this being in
private email.

secondly, if you do have such problems -- use [e-mail] as arbitration.

given that this discussion doesn't need to go any further *here*, i'm going to
close this bug, and ask you guys to take it to email.

Comment 8

[James Cox]

resolved/invalid, not wontfix. nothing is meant by them, it's just a thing in
bugzilla.

Comment 9

[James Cox]

sorry for the spam on this.

Comment 10

[Dawn Endico]

keep in mind that english is not ben's first language and i think he comes
across rougher than he means to sometimes. please everyone, lets kiss and
make up.

Comment 11

[roberts]

Perhaps I didn't make the nature of my complaint clear:  

As a software developer myself, I consider changing a major working feature of
a system which has many live users, and by so doing making the feature unusable,
to be unprofessional.  To further tell the user that he should not have been
using the feature in the first place because, in the developers opinion, the
feature was sub-standard is even more unprofessional.  Finally, to tell the
users that "new, improved" version of the feature was there to stay is just
plain unacceptable.

Comment 12

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> can come across as being rude

Rereading the comments, I don't even think I was rude. I got a bit sarcastic in
the end, when the discussion seemed to circle.

> answering the same question a bunch of times does that to you.

Yes, and plaintext conversion seems to be a particularily religious topic.
Everybody (incl. myself :-( ) think he has the only true opinion.

> lets kiss and make up.

*kiss* ;-P
I won't wear make-up, though...

> I consider changing a major working feature of a system which has many live
> users, and by so doing making the feature unusable, to be unprofessional.

This has pretty much *always* been implemented this way in Mozilla, for more
than 2 years now.

> To further tell the user that he should not have been
> using the feature in the first place

huh?

> Finally, to tell the users that "new, improved" version of the feature was
> there to stay is just plain unacceptable.

It seems to me that you start reopening the discussion here now. Please keep the
discussion about the topic to the real bug.